DOLORES - ART

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Dolores left us on 7 May 2016, and though I had known her only a bare two years I miss her. She was a lovely lady, the most serene and open I have met. Though it's now a little past her second anniversary, it seems appropriate to celebrate an aspect of her life - her art.

If I'm to be brutally honest, I must admit that this was drafted for the anniversary but got lost in my drafts. As you'll see below, it's not the first time that family's art "went astray".

Dolores's interest in painting did not surprise me, though I only found out about it after she had gone.

She would have done art at school, Santa Sabina in Sutton, and her father would have encouraged her interest at home.

Were it not for the hand of fate, she would have attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now NCAD) like her father and aunt before her.

Her father was Gordon Brewster, an RHA exhibited artist and the chief cartoonist with Independent Newspapers. Outside of his official duties he would draw copiously for his children.

Sadly he died suddenly in 1946, when Dolores was only 17, and his estranged wife came back over from England to sort out his affairs and "to claim the children".

That was the end of Dolores's art for for the moment.

In fact it was also the end of Gordon's fine art, most if not all of which went up in smoke in the back garden.

Although she helped her own children with their colouring when they were young, Dolores didn't turn to the painting until later in life when she had more leisure and joined an art group, with which she stayed until the end.

What you see above are just a tiny few examples of her paintings.

I love the colours, but, of course, there are those around me who secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, seem to think I'm sort of colour blind. But no matter.

Sadly, around the turn of the millennium, Dolores's sight began to fail and she retreated to the black and white pencil drawing which she could only do with great difficulty.

I don't know what inspired the man with the creel of turf. Perhaps it was from Wicklow or the West of Ireland. It's unlikely to have been from Howth or Sutton, which is where Dolores lived up to the time she went to England. It may have just been from her imagination.

I was very taken with this one, not for its artistic merits but for what it evokes. I was never at the Raheny trotting but was always conscious of passing the grounds on the train to and from Howth which is where I spent the first four years of my life.

Dolores Brewster-Scott
1929 - 2016